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Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems extract transcriptions, as well as semantics of intent or named entities from speech, and are essential components of voice activated systems. SLU models, which either directly extract semantics…

Spoken Language Understanding (SLU) converts hypotheses from automatic speech recognizer (ASR) into structured semantic representations. ASR recognition errors can severely degenerate the performance of the subsequent SLU module. To address…

Dialog systems, such as voice assistants, are expected to engage with users in complex, evolving conversations. Unfortunately, traditional automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems deployed in such applications are usually trained to…

In this paper, we propose to improve end-to-end (E2E) spoken language understand (SLU) in an RNN transducer model (RNN-T) by incorporating a joint self-conditioned CTC automatic speech recognition (ASR) objective. Our proposed model is akin…

Large language model (LLM) based multi-turn dialogue systems often struggle to track dependencies across non-adjacent turns, undermining both consistency and scalability. As conversations lengthen, essential information becomes sparse and…

Recent dialogue systems rely on turn-based spoken interactions, requiring accurate Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR). Errors in ASR can significantly impact downstream dialogue tasks. To address this, using dialogue context from user and…

Language models play a central role in automatic speech recognition (ASR), yet most methods rely on text-only models unaware of ASR error patterns. Recently, large language models (LLMs) have been applied to ASR correction, but introduce…

Psychoacoustic studies have shown that locally-time reversed (LTR) speech, i.e., signal samples time-reversed within a short segment, can be accurately recognised by human listeners. This study addresses the question of how well a…

Spoken dialog systems are slowly becoming and integral part of the human experience due to their various advantages over textual interfaces. Spoken language understanding (SLU) systems are fundamental building blocks of spoken dialog…

In a pipeline speech translation system, automatic speech recognition (ASR) system will transmit errors in recognition to the downstream machine translation (MT) system. A standard machine translation system is usually trained on parallel…

Automatic Speech Recognition (ASR) is an imperfect process that results in certain mismatches in ASR output text when compared to plain written text or transcriptions. When plain text data is to be used to train systems for spoken language…

Recent voice assistants are usually based on the cascade spoken language understanding (SLU) solution, which consists of an automatic speech recognition (ASR) engine and a natural language understanding (NLU) system. Because such approach…

Employing pre-trained language models (LM) to extract contextualized word representations has achieved state-of-the-art performance on various NLP tasks. However, applying this technique to noisy transcripts generated by automatic speech…

The dominant paradigm for Audio-Text Retrieval (ATR) relies on dual-encoder architectures optimized via mini-batch contrastive learning. However, restricting optimization to local in-batch samples creates a fundamental limitation we term…

Spoken language understanding (SLU) system usually consists of various pipeline components, where each component heavily relies on the results of its upstream ones. For example, Intent detection (ID), and slot filling (SF) require its…

Accurately finding the wrong words in the automatic speech recognition (ASR) hypothesis and recovering them well-founded is the goal of speech error correction. In this paper, we propose a non-autoregressive speech error correction method.…

Dialogue State Tracking (DST) is a key part of task-oriented dialogue systems, identifying important information in conversations. However, its accuracy drops significantly in spoken dialogue environments due to named entity errors from…

Automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems often falter while processing stuttering-related disfluencies -- such as involuntary blocks and word repetitions -- yielding inaccurate transcripts. A critical barrier to progress is the scarcity…

Stuttering -- characterized by involuntary disfluencies such as blocks, prolongations, and repetitions -- is often misinterpreted by automatic speech recognition (ASR) systems, resulting in elevated word error rates and making voice-driven…

The speech chain mechanism integrates automatic speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech synthesis (TTS) modules into a single cycle during training. In our previous work, we applied a speech chain mechanism as a semi-supervised…